A Eulogy for #Occupy (very close to the best thing I have ever read in my life)

This was written by Quinn Norton, a reporter for Wired who was embedded in several of the most prominent Occupy camps across the country.

It is an extraordinary piece of journalism, and the best explanation yet of what OWS was, wasn't and still is.

I don't cry very often when I read things. This made me weep.

I'm not going to cut and paste the first four paragraphs. Here are a few sentences that jumped out at me:

"OWS was a place where you didn’t have to pretend it was all OK."

"Occupy was becoming the second most fucked-up group of people in the parks. The first was still definitely the police."

"There was no real cynical distance in this movement. It was the opposite of politics that way; it was dirty and smelly and dark, and if you scratch past the patina of personal cynicism, every heart was made of crazy-glued porcelain. Every body was made of scars. No one walked away from Occupy the same person."

"We all learned so much in the season of Occupy. We learned there is a hostile army threaded through our nation. We learned that children can be casually brutalized, just to keep traffic from being inconvenienced. We learned that Americans can come together and care for one another. We learned there is a great and terrible spirit in this land, the sleeping giant of our spirits summed together."

"The future was still coming and Bloomberg’s army had only guns to fight time."

1. Up

2. And this.

Because the GA had no way to reject force, over time it fell to force. Proposals won by intimidation; bullies carried the day. What began as a way to let people reform and remake themselves had no mechanism for dealing with them when they didn’t. It had no way to deal with parasites and predators. It became a diseased process, pushing out the weak and quiet it had meant to enfranchise until it finally collapsed when nothing was left but predators trying to rip out each other’s throats.

5. Exactly

Every movement needs a leader.
Want to get RWers like my dad? Find an articulate person who can dress nice. It sucks, but that makes a difference in perception. You can't change the system from outside.
Someone needs to step up otherwise they are just preaching to the choir.
Of course, our resident OWS will yell at me for daring to criticize their darling movement, but fire away. I support OWS and I hope they get a real voice so my dad will say "Hmmm...maybe they are on to something".

12. K&R nt

13. Really brilliant. Here's another shot at the top spot on the DU page....

A snippet more from the article:

"In Oakland, a few weeks later, I called my Wired editor to tell him I needed to expense a gas mask. “I want to tell you that’s ridiculous,” he told me, “but I can’t.” He agreed, and I got my mask.

Oakland was hard for me to work, both logistically and emotionally. They hated the press more than any other Occupy, and faced more violence. But they had the biggest actions, too, and the happiest and most hopeful people I saw in the movement. Children danced at the Port of Oakland closure, marching bands played. “We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!”

It felt true, until night fell. The old women and children who had closed the port or marched in the street would go home. For those who remained, the nights often came to resemble a moving street battle more than a protest. Lines would advance and fall back, barricades went up, guns were fired, lives were destroyed. The next day, they would rebuild their camps. The camps were ragged, but beautiful too — hung with colored ribbons, cloths, the endless and endlessly decorated signs.

The first time I got teargassed was in Oakland while the line was slowly advancing on the plaza from the north. The police were dark against the night, the lights and flashes glinting off their riot face shields or gas masks. There was a press gaggle to the right of the protesters."

18. Yes this needs a kick

19. OWS is dead, long live OWS

There is no shame here, as the Milennials, a generation that was not equipped for protest, or even give much attention, did what the Boomers and sadly, the Gen Xers said they could not do. OWS , for all the ugliness, deserves support and praise.

And I will note that while OWS may be down, the anger behind it is NOT out, and it can and will erupt.

20. Up

22. Chris Hedges:

"Our dying corporate class, corrupt, engorged on obscene profits and indifferent to human suffering, is the guarantee that the mass movement will expand and flourish. No one knows when. No one knows how. The future movement may not resemble Occupy. It may not even bear the name Occupy. But it will come. I have seen this before. And we should use this time to prepare, to educate ourselves about the best ways to fight back, to learn from our mistakes, as many Occupiers are doing in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and other cities. There are dark and turbulent days ahead. There are powerful and frightening forces of hate, backed by corporate money, that will seek to hijack public rage and frustration to create a culture of fear. It is not certain we will win. But it is certain this is not over."